Slashdot Mirror
Cloning In The Animal Kingdom
tanveer1979 writes "The New Scientist is carrying an interesting article
on cloning in nature." From the article: "The ant Wasmannia Auropunctata, which is native to Central and South America but has spread into the US and beyond, has opted for a unique stand-off in the battle of the sexes. Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves - so males and females seem to have entirely separate gene pools. Conventional reproduction happens only to produce workers. This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning, though male honeybees do it occasionally." National Geographic is also carrying the story.
I for one welcome our new ant-cloning Wasmannia Auropunctata overlords!
Does this mean that Bush will have to declare war on this "Wasmannia Auropunctata" too? Or is that just for oil?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
But aren't most of the ants in a colony workers?
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
You'd think if the animal's can do it, we'd be allowed too. I say this is lovely fuel for the fire.
A B A C A B B
I find it interesting that they speak as though the male ants had an intelligence that decided to modify its genes as described. I tried changing my genes and it didn't help me run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where I put my keys. Usually, I don't find those bad boys until I change my jeans.
Whether they clone or not doesn't concern me. They are all equal in my eyes when I'm holding the Raid can.
This is the first instance in the animal kingdom where males reproduce exclusively by cloning
Are you kidding? How do you think Slashdotters reproduce?
The coolest voice ever.
I believe I speak for most Slashdot drones when I say, yes, there may be hope for us to spread our genes after all.
They are an afront to Jesus and the holy book and thy sinning, cloning, ants that dare copulate in an unnatural way must be cast down to the lair of Satan.
WTF?
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
The queen also can produce both males and potentially other queens. In bees, when another queen is hatched and matured it will likely challenge the existing queen and the winner will continue the hive. Survival of the fittest indeed. I'd imagine it works similarily with ants. The queen is usually the key because she makes all the other ants. What is different here is that the queen is cloning herself and so are the males, that is, if they can prove this theory. Perhaps the fireants are evolving into a super colony themselves.
zosxavius photography
One of my pet peeves is how the media in general consistently screws up binomial nomenclature...it's not Wasmannia Auropunctata - the correct form is Wasmannia auropunctata...the genus name is capitalized, the species name is not...ever! Petty? Maybe...but only if you feel that being correct is not important...non-scientists just don't take the time to understand & then blame scientists for not telling them...so consider yourself told. :)
...go FSCK yourself??
"Nature bats last..."
There's been a lot of discussion here lately about how Forbes and howstuffworks.com have been providing "articles" that are thinly vieled attempts at promoting movies like Batman and Star Wars. But this attempt at pushing cloning into the limelight on the very same day that FOX is showing Jurassic Park II: The Lost World is just too damn much. I never would have dreamed that National Geographic would sell out like this.
STOP THE INSANITY!
I remember back in the '80s we used to modify our jeans with a pair of scissors. That didn't help us run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where we put our keys either. Oh well 2 down, ininitely many more to go.
I'm an elite member of the bush administration, and I just want to say those ants will be going to hell for this.
In a lot of ways I think that the above is true. However, I don't really know if the hive mentality would ever really truly fit for humans though as they tend to show many more tendancies towards the herd or the pack mentality. Once you start thinking of most humans as sheep, the world starts making more sense and starts becoming a lot more depressing. Face it. People just don't want to think about the world and what is going on in it. I know that there are exceptions, but most people do not want the responsibility that comes with knowledge of their world and are much more content sitting in the comfort of their low crime cookie-cutter suburb watching network television than worrying about all hte really terrible things that are happening to people all over the globe.
Hell, if people would just start thinking of how much freaking garbage they produce on a weekly basis and the big fucking hole in the woods that someone dug and lined with plastic to dump it all...oh hell, what's the fucking use?
No wonder people get depressed.
zosxavius photography
Ever see ants carrying little white things that look like rice? That is them moving their larvae about.
Oh shit! I thought they were stealing rice from my kitchen, so I stole it back and later used it to make stir fry. *gag*
"This apparently gave males both the time and the means to evolve a counterattack--converting some of the workers into males."
Huh. Around here, we hang up posters of nekkid queen ants. Oooooh, those unarticulated segements! Kind of makes you want to pupate, doesn't it?
Clearly, all ants are going to hell.
[o]_O
while(1) fork();
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Q: How does the PHB make the IT department's server storage redundant and bug free?
A: He sprays it with Raid.
Lame, I know....
From the article:
"'It's a selfish strategy initiated by females [in which] queens transmit 100 percent of their genome,' Fournier said."
Wow, sounds like Fournier is waging his own battle of the sexes. Those selfish females, they want to clone themselves rather than have sex with me!
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
Its Wasmannia aropunctata not "Wasmannia Auropunctata", the species name is never in caps. No chance in hell the editors would catch that though...
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
I remember back in the '70s when I tried to Modify my Jean with a pair of scissors. It didn't make her run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where I put my keys, either.
In fact, all it got me was a release from jail for murder last week.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
The Nat. Geographic article hints at how this works, basically all the DNA from the female is eliminated from the egg by the male DNA.
:)
The way the submitter, and the New Scientist teaser worded it you were left wondering exactly how the male ants cloned themselves. Little ant laboratories perhaps? Being a matriarchy, I'm sure their government disapproves.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
But..but..they will not have a soul.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Man I thought I stole the show with my comment but damn....
And which animals would those be?
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Are these classifications really relevant to this species? I'm always amused by the need of scientists to classify species as male and female. Like the Sea Horse, where the "male" gets pregnant. How meaningful is that?
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
It's okay. Yours is good. I've just got a great deal more experience at saying outrageous and outrageously stupid things.
I was something of an army brat, and till I was about 14 all my friends were over 60 vets, buddies of my Grandpa.
Of course, I didn't get to polish it up until I was in the JROTC.
Nothing like being 16 and 'talking' your 'supply sergeant' into giving you live ammo for a gun so you and your pals could go down to the shooting range.
High Times.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
When people start Cloning Britney Spears as a marketable commodity will the clones turn out to be the same sort of strumpet? I would guess that that would be what they would want anyway.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
How do they manage to survive as species without the benefit of variation from sexual reproduction?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Bees are haplo-diploid. That means that females are diploid (2 copies of every chromosome) but males are haploid, forming from unfertilised eggs. So when eggs are fertilised by males, the offspring (workers) end up having 1/2 their mother's DNA but all of their fathers. This means that unlike "normal" sexual reproduction, siblings share 3/4 of their DNA on average, which is more than they could share with their own offspring. So it is in their genes best interest to help produce more siblings than to produce their own offspring.
Check out this website:
http://www.evergreen-foundation.com./#
Then login under "extranet login".
By-pass sloppy security with this id & pswd: PROPAGATE
I can't figure out WTF is going on. I didn't think the tech was that far advanced.
I, for one, welcome our Ant Clone overlords!
Click here to read.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Maybe they do it for economic reasons? You could save a fortune on dinners and movies.
With such a narrow gene pool, could this be an indication that this particular species has attained an evolutionary standpoint at which the present DNA happens to be at the end of its possible evolution?
Some genetics/evolution specialists here care to explain?
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
these ants have struck the perfect balance between diversity and population. They need one-quarter as many males as females.
There's an appropriate gene combination for every form of significant ecological change the colony has previously encountered. When the ecology changes, the queens and males breed experimental variations of the species. Those that add a new combination that provides the form of worker ant that will keep the colony alive will join the ranks of the self-cloning.
I always end up seeing this life "thing" as coming around back to memes in our genes. Life does what is necessary to keep DNA moving forward through time.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If animals all reproduced by cloning, how would shy parents be able to teach their kids about sex?
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
i'm not sure why cloning in nature comes to us as a surprise at all. all single cellular organisms duplicate themselves (i.e. cloning). we've already known for a long that that many animals in the animal kingdom are known to have asexual reproduction.
. htm
from http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa090700a
In asexual reproduction, one individual produces offspring that are genetically identical to itself. These offspring are produced by mitosis. There are many invertebrates, including sea stars and sea anemones for example, that produce by asexual reproduction.
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The PDF of the Nature article is available here.
What makes this remarkable is that males are reproducing asexually.
"I tried changing my genes and it didn't help me run faster, jump higher, or gain the ability to remember where I put my keys."
Perhaps you need to find looser fitting genes?
Tighter genes would make it easier to find your keys, but rather limits movement...
Sorry, but it is the female worker bees, and not the male drones, that sometimes clone themselves. AFAIK, this has only been observed in queenless colonies and has been explained as a genetic escape mechanism. Without a queen, a hive would otherwise be a reproductive dead end. When unfertilized workers lay haploid eggs in response to lack of queen pheromones, all of the eggs become male drones. Although the colony remains doomed, the drones can go out and mate with queens from other colonies and continue the genetic line. See this article for a general description of this phenomenon. So you might ask why workers don't cheat and clone themselves more often. Well, they do, but their sisters don't stand for it.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
I hope they have good lawyers to fight off the patent suits...
Baaaa :)
Animals also masturbate... I'll start without you.
Lubed or chafed?